WoodITWork.com

VMware has today released the VMware Horizon Suite which they are calling “The platform for workforce mobility.”

The Horizon Suite was initially announced at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco and is VMware’s integrated product suite for End User Computing which comprises three main components:

• VMware Horizon Workspace
• VMware Horizon View
• VMware Horizon Mirage

This is a big step for VMware by providing a far more integrated End User Computing suite for customers rather than perpetuating the old tiring battle of VDI brokers between VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop. VDI is important but only a part of the overall “delivering applications to users” so VMware is providing  a lot more in this suite by bringing together traditional VDI with applications and data. This is the initial release with some things that don’t integrate yet or as well as they should so hopefully the Suite will become more tightly knit down the road. It will be interesting to see how customers respond.

VMware Horizon Workspace
VMware envisions VMware Horizon Workspace as a “Multi-device workspace for IT services” and sees three trends that are changing IT. New device platforms with less reliance on Windows, new apps with more SaaS and mobile apps and new user expectations including better collaboration and productivity.

Read more…

VMware’s US mega conference, VMworld kicks off in San Francisco in just over 2 weeks time. 19000 people attended in Las Vegas last year (we will have to see whether the choice of venue affects the numbers for this year!)

This will be my first time attending VMworld US as living in London I have attended VMworld Europe previously so am excited to see the differences, enjoy the bigger conference and meet some more fellow vExperts and other community members.

There’s obviously a huge amount that goes on at the conference from the keynote speaches, breakout sessions, panel discussions, labs, formal and informal meetings, and general networking so working out what to actually see with so much going on is harder than many people would assume.

Read more…

Today I have the pleasure of talking at the London VMware User Group.

My presentation is called Help, My VDI Project is Hell!

There are many complexities with VDI projects causing many to fail at the planning stage, at the POC or testing stage or even worse during the implementation phase.

I go through some of the Magic Fixes that VDI is meant to solve and what the reality often turns out to be with all this new technology you need to consider.

Looking at some research stats, many companies are doing VDI for the wrong reasons with many thinking they should do VDI to save costs and then realising this often isn’t the case.

VDI is great for many use cases, remote connectivity, security, quicker provisioning, containing your VM info, maybe availability, maybe easier management but can be also terrible in many circumstances with performance, user experience, cost, peripherals, licensing, flexibility, support and general complexity issues.

I then go through the 3 things you need to work out, your strategy, your apps and your users.

Read more…

Citrix XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 is the latest release of XenServer but it is not supported as a hypervisor with either XenDesktop 4 or XenDesktop 5.

Have a look at the Citrix eDocs for Host Requirements / Hosting Infrastructure.

XenDesktop 4
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/xendesktop-bdx/cds-hosting-infrastructure-reqs-bdx.html

XenDesktop 5
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/xendesktop-rho/cds-sys-reqs-host-rho.html

XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 has been out since 15 December 2010 and the release notes specifically mention enhancements to Provisioning Services and XenDesktop (only coming in a future release)

Provisioning Services improvements to Windows volume license (MAK and KMS) support.

XenDesktop platform enhancements. Provides local host caching of VM images to reduce storage TCO for XenDesktop VDI deployments. (Note: these platform enhancements will be enabled by a future version of XenDesktop).

XenDesktop 5 was released on 3 December 2010. OK, that’s only 12 days before XenServer FP1 but surely Citrix would have made the enhancements to XenDesktop 5 to support XenServer 5.6 FP 1…obviously not.

I’ve heard from Citrix that XenServer 5.6 Service Pack 2 is due for release soonish and will be supported by both XenDesktop 4 and 5. This does contradict somewhat with the release notes which state support will be in a newer version of XenDesktop rather than a newer version of XenServer.

If you are running XenDesktop 4 or 5 with XenServer 5.6 as the hypervisor, don’t upgrade to Feature Release 1, rather wait for Service Pack 2.

I was honoured to be invited as the first guest on vSoup.net joining Chris Dearden (@chrisdearden), Ed Czerwin (@eczerwin) and Christian Mohn (@h0bbel) talking about virtualisation

We spoke about managing virtual desktops, VDI, HP Flex-10 switches and firmware issues, storage and plently of other things!

You can download the podcast from vsoup.net or even better subscribe through iTunes.

Going virtual is all about sharing resources. You are no longer constrained by one server or workstation running on one physical piece of hardware. The benefit is less physical kit to look after and better utilisation of resources but the detriment is when you share, you need to share nicely. In a shared environment one VM can be greedy and take more than its fair share and your other VMs suffer.

It’s not just sharing nicely that you need to consider but also building your VMs so they need less so there’s more to go around.

VDI is all about maximising the use of your physical hardware. To be cost effective (if you can with VDI!), you want to run as many workstations on a physical host as you can without sacrificing individual VM performance.

So, if your VMs are greedy with what they need you are going to be paying more for hardware. Wasting resources on physical workstations may not cost that much more but move your workstation into your datacenter and then see how much money you will be wasting.

Read more…